Doreen Goes On Vacation: A Cautionary Tale from JuliaDennebaum on Vimeo.
On May 14, 2007, I started my very first job at Markel Corporation as a File Associate. It was my first real job ever and I was one of the few 2007 graduates who had a job I started three days before I had officially graduated. I lucked out. I also lucked out in that my co-workers, Kris, Jack and Becca, were awesome. Not too long after I started working there, Becca was promoted and replaced with an equally awesome co-worker Melissa. Together, Kris, Jack, Melissa, and I, under the fearless leadership of our boss Doreen, formed the file room dream team “Bar None”.
Doreen, Our Fearless LeaderEvery day I looked forward to going to work because it really wasn’t work. It was me hanging out with two of my favorite people and completing necessary daily activities with them. It was great. We had so much fun together every day.
For any co-workers reading this, let me just put a disclaimer forth: at this time in the file room, in the pre-scanning era, sometimes there really wasn’t that much to do. Doreen was aware of this and we did a great job, always completing what was required and more, but there was goofing off at times. Okay, disclaimer done, continuing forth.
I made several rubber band balls and we had some rousing games of chair basketball. This consisted of us rolling around on our chairs, chair checking one another, bouncing the rubber band ball, and slam dunking it into the Iron Mountain box which served as our net. It was hella fun.
Kris and the accursed RicohKris, Melissa and I became awesome friends outside of work too. There was a sense of comradery in being one of the over-looked File Associates. There were several times we busted our butts completing projects and doing more work on it then almost anyone else (ahem, when we moved about 150 boxes of files from one building to the other and the vice president sent out an email thanking all the men who helped move computers one day). But we’d get over it, because our boss Doreen knew how hard we worked and that she could depend on us to get the job done with integrity and efficiency. We were “Bar None”. Plus, Jack provided us with fresh fruit and crude comments daily. No one else was so blessed.
One fine August day, it occurred to us that every other department had artwork decorating their respective areas. Yet ours was completely devoid of anything colorful. This HAD to be corrected. As the resident artist, naturally the task of painting fell to me, but what would it be of? The brainstorming commenced.
We reminisced about the time when we were told to destroy Brittany property policies. We could not believe we actually got to destroy policies. It
Our stud Jack keeping us healthy with fruit was the most exciting thing we had ever heard of. Destroying things? And getting paid for it? We couldn’t wait to start.
That excitement lasted about 5 minutes. After you try and rip mounds of paper in half for any length of time, your hands start to cramp up something awful. And we had thousands of policies to destroy. It was terrible. Thus, Melissa riding a cart down a hill punching a Brittany (BPE) policy.
We joked about the accursed Ricoh copy machine. This thing was pure evil. It jammed all the time. And please let me illustrate that when I say jammed all the time, I mean ALL the time. Literally every document you tried to print or copy would jam, and sometimes it would jam in multiple places and you’d have to open the entire thing up and then you’d clear the jam but it would still be jammed and you were only trying to print ONE page and you just wanted to light the machine on fire and push it off a cliff. Ergo, Kris, our resident black belt, is taking a bat to the Ricoh machine.
We then wondered what should I being doing? I mean, Jack was easy. He was our buff stud who provided us with fruit every day.
And naturally Doreen was the face our emblem. She was our leader and purveyor of free lunches, overtime, and free vacation days.
Melissa defeating the Brittany PolicesBut Julie? What funny thing could I be depicted as? As I asked this, Melissa and Kris started teasing me. Logically, they brought up, I would be wearing a dress as I had frequently been caught crawling around on the floor of the shelves filing away drop mail into the claim files. At one point we had tried to put in a supply request to Dolores for knee pads for me. We were denied. They also mentioned that I didn’t get the name Julie “Boy Crazy” Dennebaum for no reason – I had previously brought in a list chronicling all of my crushes by year (which in 2007 was up to like 64 over the course of my 22 years of life). In my short span at Markel I had also had many crushes on many co-workers.
Thus the painting was born.
I started my sketch, and then followed Melissa and Kris to their evening softball game and sketched on the bleachers. Each inning they would come over and check out the progress and we would giggle about how awesome this painting was going to be and how jealous everyone at work would be.
Me, wearing a dress, what I do bestFor this painting I was still working off of Romero Britto’s style. Any one familiar with his work can see the influences heavily throughout the painting. The people, with their triangular faces, as well as the design patterns of the background, are direct re-imaginations of his work.
I went home Friday night after the game and started painting. And I kept painting all weekend, only stopping to eat, use the bathroom, and sleep. Otherwise the entirety of that weekend was spent hunched over the canvas. I wanted it to be completed by Monday so badly. We needed that artwork!
And it was. I brought it Monday morning and mounted it on the wall. Kris, Melissa, Jack and Doreen loved it. Everyone at the company was jealous. It lead to me getting 4 more commissioned artwork jobs: Special Programs: Before the Fall, OnBase 2008, Maitland the Mermaid, and several space themed paintings including Alien Perspective and Star Nebula and a mural, all of which will be getting their own write up soon.
It is bizarre the timing of these things, and maybe half the reason I wanted to write about this painting is that I am retiring from the File Room. I am relinquishing my title of file associate and ending my reign over my file room fiefdom. I had a great time, wonderful memories, lasting friendships and 2 phenomenal films. One of which I will leave you with. It may not make sense to everyone, but it does capture a moment in time of my life that I will only look upon with complete fondness. Now, upstairs I go into my own little cubicle and the world of underwriting assistance!
The completed project